Stability AI CEO Resigns Over "Centralized AI" Concerns

Dear Artisan,

One of the key questions of the AI era—perhaps the key question—will be who has the ultimate power over this ultimately powerful technology.

In a recent interview, Sam Altman said he expects the development of AGI to be an “arms race” across the world of nations and corporations vying to be the first to achieve this goal and presumably have such a head start that nobody can catch up.

On the extreme opposite end, we have decentralized AI. The notion that nobody should be in control and that these tools are in fact so powerful that they should be open for all to access (the founding mission of OpenAI).

That’s where former Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque sits, as he announced over the weekend he is stepping down from his role to go “all in on decentralized AI.”

Let’s dive in.

The One Big Thing

Decentralized AI Is Having a Moment

As the arms race for AGI development continues through the decade, there will most definitely be intense jockeying as to who gets there first.

If you believe that this technology is as revolutionary as some of its most intense proponents do, the fate of nation-states is on the line. This is the basis of the latest OpenAI drama.

Not everyone believes in that vision however. There is a growing number of people who believe that AI should be open for all, accessible to anyone without regard to their level of resources. It’s about bringing the vision and development of the original internet to the next era of computing.

Emad Mostaque, former CEO of Stability AI, is in that camp. Stability AI was one of the first big AI companies to open source its foundation models and nearly all of its tooling - Stable Diffusion. This means that anyone with enough computing power on their computer could download and run Stable Diffusion on their own device, tweak it to their desires, and use their creations with an open commercial license. All for free.

Yesterday, Emad announced he was leaving the company he started over concerns of “centralized AI.”

From the replies to this tweet, it looks like Emad is joining Render Network, a project using blockchain-based incentives to create a decentralized network of GPUs (and potentially much more).

This is a huge step for the decentralized AI movement. People from Elon Musk to Emad have been voicing concerns over one group like OpenAI or Google having absolute access to AGI for a long time. Recent moves by Grok to open source their tech, as well as this one from Emad to simply leave, show that some people are actually putting their money where their mouth is to move this mission forward.

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Closing Thought

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